PROTECTION: Rescuing the AIDS Orphans of Africa

Aurelia's Day Orphanage 2009, Picture by Phiip Maher

This picture was taken in 2009.  I remember it well.  I am embracing a young boy who was orphaned by AIDS.  We are sitting in the schoolroom at Aurelia's day orphanage in Eshowe South, Africa.  Aurelia was a remarkable woman, a real leader in her community.  In 2009, we were thirteen years into the use of effective treatment for HIV in North America.  Those treatments were not yet widely available in South Africa and not available at all in rural communities.  (I gloss over this comment as if it is just a statistic but if I pause for just a second, if you pause for just a second, it describes a world that is unjust where the gap between the rich and the poor is obscene and unacceptable.  There are many such statements in this article.  Pause for just a moment to grasp them.)

At that time, there were 18 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa.  There are still 16 million.  Aurelia was an older woman, I would guess in her late sixties.   Her twenty-something daughter had returned home to settle in while the ravages of HIV slowly took her life.  There were hundreds of 'sibling' families in the area; kids who had lost both parents to HIV, the oldest now assuming the role of parent to the younger siblings.  The community made efforts to keep these children in their family homes.  The property was the only thing between them and the streets but life for these kids was hell and for many, it remains so to this day.   These older siblings often had to give up going to school in order to find menial work or scavenge for food.

Aurelia had a brilliant idea.  With the support of a European organization, she built a day school beside the publically funded primary school.  The older kids now walked to school and on the way, dropped their preschool siblings off at Aurelia's day 'orphanage' which included a nursery for toddlers and infants and a kindergarten of sorts.  At the end of the day, the older siblings would join the staff at the orphanage, eat a meal, get help with homework and then walk off into the night, young children in tow, to an empty, parentless shack.

This was the first time I visited Aurelia's school.  I was there with a team of nine from Canada including two brilliant first-year university students who jumped in without hesitation and started throwing gleeful children into the air and onto their backs, rolling in the mud, tickling, giggling.  I could sense it was pure joy but that is not what I felt.

Big smile on my face as I held this now protected child in my arms; protected by an African woman whose innovative idea saved the lives of hundreds of kids, but I did not feel that smile or revel in the boisterous sound of joy flowing in from the playground.  I felt frozen, numb, nothing; my protected emotions buried deep.  I could not look into the camera.  You can fake a smile but eyes will tell all.  By 2009, I had watched too many of these children die of AIDS and I knew there was a good chance that this little guy had AIDS  too.  I am not sure if he was able to jump the massive canyon between being protected and being treated.  I am not sure if he is alive.

Aurelia passed away several years ago.  I heard from a South African friend that her funeral was packed and that many of the children she protected were in attendance.

I am 14 years into this work now.   Fourteen years of trying to make sense of a world that ignores it's most precious human resource, that allows millions of children to struggle to survive, to die alone, to face the world's most daunting challenges on their own.  I will never understand the hunger for wealth and power that drives so many of the world's leaders to recklessly grasp for more wealth and more power despite who is left to die, no murdered, in their path.  Because that is what this is.  The vulnerable, the weak, the marginalized, the children, that are 'disposed' of without a question or a second thought.  I will never understand.

What difference does it make when we raise funds to keep 51 kids alive in foster homes in Lesotho?  What difference does it make when we fund 1 mobile health unit that provides treatment to the most vulnerable?   But not millions just hundreds.  What difference does it make when our efforts fund two units, three units, how about six units?  Well, OK.  Six would allow us to reach 100,000 people.  Does that make a difference?  There are millions more.  Does it really make any difference?

It did to the orphans Aurelia protected and rescued.  It does to each and every one of the 51 orphans we love and care for.  It will to the thousands who will receive care when our next goal is reached.

I can't stand up against the greed, the corruption or the recklessness that has left billions of people on our planet without even the most basic of necessities, the most basic human rights.  I can't make even a tiny dent in the massive issues our world struggles with.  But we can.

Fourteen years into this work and I will continue.  I will carry your torch, Aurelia, and mine too.  I will pass our torches on to others who will pass theirs on too.  We will continue to rise up, to stand, to work for those that need us most.


Dr. Anne-Marie Zajdlik MD CCFP O.Ont. MSM
Founder Bracelet of Hope.

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